Enough with the negativity

On a recent dotKDE article about the weekly commit digest, someone brought up again the issue of Plasma, a component of KDE 4 whose object is to bring “revolution” to the current desktop paradigm. However, I think that many in the community had unrealistic expectations, so some people even started to think it was vaporware, like in some comments in the aforementioned article.

I’ll say it again, people had unrealistic expectations. KDE 4 is a big step ahead than previous versions, and first of all a new foundation was needed. A large part of the improvements is under the hood (think about Solid or Phonon, for example). Plasma, as far as I can see, was not immune from that. Solid bases had to be built before moving forward. Thanks to that paradigm, there are already interesting results such as the new krunner. But there’s still (according to a glance on the KDE Techbase) a lot of work on the user-invisible parts to be done.

That’s why I don’t understand all the negativity, especially because it’s not even remotely constructive. Pushing your expectations on someone else is a sign of rudeness, especially since you know that those people are already working very hard (look up the commit digest, ignorance is not an excuse). Also because KDE 4 is not out yet and it’s not finished.

And I have to point out it’s not just a problem with Plasma. When Dolphin was announced as the default file manager (even though Konqueror is not going away), there was an unjustified outrage. Calm down, people. If you don’t like something, if you can’t contribute at least be constructive about it.